From Contingent to Retained: A 5 Part Series

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What if I could show you way by simply changing the relationship you have with clients, you will be able to make triple the placements, do less wasted activity and absolutely fall in love with your profession again? Would you be interested? Sound like a pipedream? Well it’s not. It’s so simple and has been my mission for the last 5 years of taking the executive search industry on a path to get the above benefits. All of this by simply changing their relationships with clients. “But What’s the problem with Contingent Search” you say? Simple. NO ONE has Skin in the Game. In most contingent search relationships, you are simply one of many vendors racing to supply a commodity. People. Hopefully high performing people. There are many vendors racing to quickly send over candidates in hopes someone will catch the client’s eye and get interviewed. The one who send over the right candidate first, gets paid. All others get nothing. NOTHING. And most recruiters fill 1 out of 8 to 1 out of 10 searches they work on. Making them 10-18% efficient. To compare this to something - contingent relationships payoff less than most slot machines at a casino. Let that sink in.

In order to change that dynamics, you need to change the relationships with clients to Mutually Committed, Skin in the Game Relationships. Over the next four months, we will go over step by step - how to move every relationship to Mutually committed and bringing your Job Order to Placement ratio to 1 to 1. What will this mean to you if you implement the changes? You will become a trusted advisor with your clients, you can stop racing to send in candidates in, you will have more fun at what you do and double if not triple your revenue in no time. And anyone can do it.

The first step in the process is to understand what your clients are going through based on current hiring practices and contingent search methodologies. Based on Brad Smarts – Top grading, his block buster book that has been on the top of the HR business book Charts since 2005, Brad says that the facts are “one out of every two hires that a business makes, turns out to be a mishire. Meaning that the person hired did not perform to expectations. Brad goes on to say that the cost of a mis hire is 5-24x a persons salary. So a person that we hire for 50K per year, 0% of all hires are bad ones and cost more than 250K per year to the company. That is the problem your clients are struggling with. And the race of contingent search just increases the likelihood of a mis hire dilemma.

Next month we will cover the process of insuring your clients do not have a mis hire, and transition over to becoming their trusted advisor in helping them hire high performers. And a path to money upfront.